


Twins

by FelicityGS



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Lokicest, M/M, Twincest, author has a fixation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-09
Updated: 2013-12-09
Packaged: 2018-01-04 04:09:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1076371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FelicityGS/pseuds/FelicityGS
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Last of the three drabbles in the verse. May add more later but for now it's getting marked complete.</p></blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

  
Everyone knows there’s something off about the Laufey twins.

They’re identical—obviously—and even with the haircuts, it’s hard to tell them apart. It doesn’t help they answer to each other’s names, how in the flow of conversation one will call the other _Loki_ _brother_ and then will say  _Loptr dear_  not a minute later. It’s like even they aren’t entirely sure where one of them ends and the other begins or who’s who anymore.

Which is a lie, obviously, because they both have licenses. Barton swears they trade them, though, for giggles. After all, it’s like anyone would be able to tell. Anyone who’s met the twins believes him—it’s exactly the sort of thing they would do.

There’s a lot about them that’s a lie, or made up, or probably true, but the only ones who seem to be able to tell are the Laufey twins and it’s not like they’re telling.

Rogers—Steve Rogers, star of the football team—says that Loptr’s nicer than Loki, which is how a person is meant to tell, but no one else sees it. Rogers says Loptr’s tricks don’t end up with anyone getting hurt, that no one gets really put in any danger, which means Loptr is the one with the shorter hair that’s always kept carefully slicked back, ends curling at the top of his neck.

Banner—who is lab partners with one of them, even the teacher isn’t sure which—thinks the one with shorter hair is Loki. That Loptr has longer hair that tends to be a bit of a mess and gets roughly shoved into a pony tail whenever they’re working. It’s common knowledge Loki has anakastic personality disorder because one of the twins will always correct anyone who tries to say Loki has OCD. Banner is pretty sure Loki would never let his hair look like such a wreck, even just during a lab experiment, so clearly Rogers is wrong and Loptr is the one with long hair that falls past his shoulders.

Stark doesn’t care  _who_ is who, because they’re both smart and they keep up whenever he teases them. He spent a year trying to chase them both before settling for sometimes friends. Get him drunk enough, and he’ll talk about seeing them in the stair well of Meredith hall, one pressing the other against the wall and giving him a hand job, tongues halfway down each other’s throats. Most people will at least  _voice_ disbelief—Stark has a known alcohol problem—but it’s questionable whether they  _actually_ disbelieve him.

This might have to do with the fact Romanoff—most trustworthy source of university gossip and already writing freelance for several sites—has never once said Stark is lying, just smiled at his story.

Stark isn’t the only one who’s seen them a bit closer than is entirely, well,  _normal_ for siblings. It’s well known no one gets one without the other, well known how at parties they’ll twine their hands together so they don’t lose each other, and  _everyone_ remembers the afternoon there was an explosion in the chem labs and Loki—the short haired one, who Bruce thinks is Loki—injured several people who tried to restrain him and nearly hyperventilated until he was reunited with a slightly singed and mostly unscathed Loptr. Everyone remembers how they held each other, faces buried against each other’s necks, and remembers very politely finding something else to look at, because they held each other like soul mates, like lovers, not like family grateful they didn’t lose each other, and it was a week before they let each other out of sight again.

Really, it’s all a bit weird, unsettling even, but no one brings it up because Thor did and _he_  transferred schools—the long haired one, the one Steve thinks is Loki, at fault. Well. Theoretically. It’s not like anyone could pin it on him.


	2. Chapter 2

They switch names.

This doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense to anyone, except their mother, but Laufey has never had the time to stop and explain her boys to anyone, nor has she desired to. She is, perhaps, the only one who seems to keep track of who is going by what from moment to moment, and they love her dearly for it.

If asked, she will, impatiently (busy as she often is with the running and reinvention of her brand), say, “Call him Lo.”

She doesn’t have the slightest why this is so  _difficult_  to understand. 

The boys—who are not boys so much as young men groomed to run her empire—adore her for this, above all things, because it is nice for at least one person to recognize that a name is simply that— _a name_ —and is not, in fact, necessarily true to their every whim.

Loki—the name, not whichever twin originally was called that—means cruelty and viciousness and a certain petty spite that might be more suited to a child that hasn’t  _quite_  learned empathy. It means exactitude, order, neatness of appearance.

(These are not the same things as dominance and sadism, though more than a few people have assumed such, much to both twins amusement.)

Loptr is the opposite, for the most part, older and wilder and rougher at the edges, but kinder in all things; enough so people have learned the distinction, even if they’ve yet to realize the name is little more than a label, an indicator of  _today I am less murderous_.

It’s  _far_  more reliable to distinguish them by hair cut and habit than it will ever be to distinguish them by name.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last of the three drabbles in the verse. May add more later but for now it's getting marked complete.

She is as close to a queen as one can be in her society.

There are men who are bitter because of her, who hate her, who call her a bitch because she thinks her due is what they have and more, and Laufey knows this and Laufey smiles and Laufey says

“Another martini, boys?”

with the sly smile that has been the despair of  _everyone_.

Laufey is a genius. Stark—Howard, the elder—and Borson—Odin, the elder—are both entirely aware of this, the only two people who manage to come close to her, but their problem (according to Laufey) is they don’t know how to change with the tides. Oh, Stark can  _innovate_  (and make no mistake, Laufey does not say the word with any kindness) and Borson can  _weaponize_  (same), but—and this is most important—neither of them understand  _why_  what catches catches. They will bitch like dogs at the moon (and she expects you to smile at her jest, and you will, because she’s  _lovely_ , like a knife) about this fad or that, how it keeps them from working on what they want.

Laufey’s secret is no secret at all—she always is working on exactly what she wishes, and what she wishes is always  _exactly_  what  _everyone wants_.

Laufey accepts no as an answer in exactly two places—in bed, and from her children.

She has two children—boys, twins—bright-eyed and brilliant as she is even at a young age, handsome like twin serpents. A few magazines dared suggest Laufey was settling down, and fewer businessmen dared to think this was true. Laufey settled down the same way that a mother tiger settles, which is to say  _keener-sharper-faster_.

The mistake, you see, is that everyone assumed that because Laufey had the children because she wanted children (a life-long dream, understand), she would be softer, kinder,  _distracted_.

By the end of the quarter, there wasn’t a single business left standing that thought so.

More interesting to both Stark and Borson (both who did  _not_  make the mistake to think children meant Laufey would  _settle_ ) is that her boys  _adore_  her. It is no secret how much Tony (Laufey always calls him Tony, treats him and Maria like a nephew and sister, respectively) dislikes Howard, and if there isn’t some scandal with Thor (who distrusts Laufey with a mulishness that Laufey calls  _quaint_ ), then Borson is quite fortunate, because Thor has  _quite_  the known temper problem. For all the  _confusion_  that surrounds her sons—which Laufey has no patience to clear up, because she is a genius, just as they are, and it’s  _obvious_  to her who they are—there’s only been one true _scandal_  involving them, at fourteen, which Laufey came down so hard on so quickly no one even knows what  _happened_  except her and her sons.

Which is, of course, exactly how Laufey prefers it.

Information is powerful, but more so is the control of it—who hears what, telling people who need to know the  _just_  right scoop at  _just_  the right time, and what is lost forever to the pile of secrets she hoards the way dragons hoard treasures.

It’s a lesson she plans to pass on to her sons, before all else, because Laufey doesn’t just want an industry and empire  _now_ —she wants it  _forever_.

After all, why settle for less? 


End file.
